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The Arrangement

Like many single women looking for love in New York, the journalist Anita Jain was fed up with the local dating scene. In 2005, Jain, who was then 32, wrote an article for New York magazine ­— “Is Arranged Marriage Really Any Worse Than Craigslist?” — in which she wondered whether she should let her Indian relatives find her a husband.

It seemed tempting. What marriage-minded woman doesn’t dream of never having to walk into a singles bar again? Yet, while few modern Westerners would be willing to outsource their spousal selection (heck, most won’t even let their mothers set them up on a coffee date), Jain actually hopped on a plane to Delhi. It was the reverse journey her father had taken more than three decades earlier, when he left his homeland for America in search of better job opportunities. Jain, on the other hand, was going to India for what she hoped would be better dating opportunities.

And why not? As her mother would say of her own happy arranged marriage: “It’s not that there isn’t love. It’s just that it comes after marriage.” Besides, while an American man might date a woman for years and still not know if he wants to marry her, Jain was eager to meet Indian men with “their clarity of intent.” She would give herself one year, which she thought would be ample time in a country where “it would not be a stretch to say that ‘shaadi,’ the word for ‘marriage’ in many Indian languages, is the first word a child in an Indian family understands after mummy and papa.”

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Credit
Yvetta Fedorova

She lands instead in the New India, with its thriving club scene, casual hookups and men who tell you to have “no expectations.” To her dismay, Jain finds herself back in “ego deflating” dating territory: leaving groveling phone messages for an unresponsive boyfriend; having a date cancel at the last minute, only to run into him later on the street with another woman (“It’s clear that, as they say, he’s just not that into me”); and trolling the Web site shaadi.com for eligible prospects (sadly, Indian men also lie about their age online). But not all tradition is lost. When Jain searches for an apartment, she struggles to find a landlord who will rent to a single woman.

Jain admits that in both countries, she might be “unmarriageable” — she’s too independent-minded, too opinionated, too picky. But even when she tries to be more flexible, rebranding a “small unemployed toothless man” with whom she goes on a pleasant 12-hour date as “a man who laughs easily and appears to hang on my every word,” she never hears from him again. For this, she moved to India?

It isn’t until the final weeks, when her parents visit, that she tries the arranged marriage route. By then, it’s apparent that while you can take the girl out of America, you can’t take American ideals out of the girl: she still craves a romantic spark. Of course, there’s nothing new in the story of a woman seeking a husband. What’s new here — and stunningly so — is Jain’s engaging, intelligent voice, at turns wry (when she catches sight of a former Sikh suitor without his turban, she comments: “Now that I can actually see him, I realize he’s kind of cute”) and provocatively curious (why do her smart, married Indian cousins, who aren’t allowed to defecate during the day in their own homes, seem more at peace with their lives than she is?).

The result is less a dating memoir than a thoughtful, incisive exploration of the nature of connection. Ultimately, Jain seems to be asking, Is modernization really progress? After all, if with choice comes freedom, then why do so many single women feel imprisoned by their loneliness?

MARRYING ANITA

A Quest for Love in the New India

By Anita Jain

307 pp. Bloomsbury. $24.99

Lori Gottlieb, a commentator for National Public Radio, is the author of “Stick Figure: A Diary of My Former Self.”

A version of this review appears in print on , on Page BR9 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: The Arrangement. Today's Paper|Subscribe